The Guild of the Infant Saviour
“No one gets a dollhouse to play at reality, but reality seeps in everywhere when we play.”
— Erik Erickson
Shortly before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, adoptee Megan Culhane Galbraith was born in a Catholic charity hospital in New York City to a teenaged resident of The Guild of the Infant Saviour, a home for unwed mothers. Decades later, on the eve of becoming a mother herself, she would travel to the former Guild site; to her birth mother’s home in Scotland; and to Cornell University, where she discovered the startling history of its Domestic Economics program. There, from 1919 to 1969, coeds applied scientific principles to domesticity as they collectively mothered a rotating cast of babies awaiting adoption. The babies shared the last name Domecon and provided the inspiration for Galbraith’s art project, The Dollhouse.
The Guild of the Infant Saviour is a dizzyingly inventive hybrid memoir of one adoptee’s quest for her past. Galbraith pairs narrative with images from The Dollhouse as she weaves a personal and cultural history of adoption as it relates to ideas around guilt, shame, identity, and memory itself. Ultimately, she connects her experiences to those of generations of adoptees, to the larger stories America tells about sex and motherhood, and to the shadows those stories cast on us all.
Praise…
"The early life of an adopted child is mysterious perhaps most of all to the child herself; in The Guild of the Infant Savior, Megan Galbraith explores this mystery with delicacy and humorous intelligence, using science, art and weird little dolls to guide her. What she finds is beautiful, sad, heartening and...mysterious. In its generous scope, Galbraith's book honors the depth and mystery of all human lives, whether we grew up with birth parents or not."
— Mary Gaitskill, author of This is Pleasure and Somebody With a Little Hammer
“An inventive, genre-defying look at what it means to belong. Galbraith artfully collects moments of her life and photographs from the past to create a touching portrait of motherhood, beauty, and home.”
—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
“THE GUILD OF THE INFANT SAVIOR depicts adoption and motherhood and more with hard-won and clear-eyed pathos. Galbraith is a model observer; here life is set before readers like her photographs, arranged into beautiful and terrifying patterns that stand fixed in time but move in the mind.”
—Matthew Salesses, author of Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear
“An extraordinary collage of motherhood and a moving journey of one woman's search for wholeness. Megan Culhane Galbraith’s personal story, braided with insightful research about adoption and foster care practices, and illustrated exquisitely with the author’s photos, is a beautiful and memorable exploration of life.”
– Jill McCorkle, author of Hieroglyphics
“It’s heartbreaking and fascinating to follow Megan Culhane Galbraith through the mysteries that make up this glorious, weird, tender, and revelatory book. Who are we? How did we become who we are? She knows these mysteries are unsolvable, but it is beautiful to watch her try.”
—Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer
“This remarkable collection is a cross between Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance and a Joseph Cornell box: a mesmerizing cabinet filled with curious relics of caretaking, dollhouse reenactments, and the haunting questions of a daughter in search of identity and belonging. Megan Culhane Galbraith is a true artist.”
— Leigh Stein, author of Self Care
“This is the most ethereal yet earthly, dreamy yet disquieting book I have cradled, embraced and, most importantly, held, an act made holy by Megan Culhane Galbraith. The Guild of the Infant Savior is a book to be held and Megan Culhane Galbraith a voice to behold.”
—Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book is available now